Buying A House: C or D?

xp as far as I've seen, zillow has more coverage than redfin at this point. No redfin in my area.

oh that is true, redfin doesnt serve every location

Yeah no Redfin coverage in my future town. Zillow and realtor.com and the local realtor sites all seem to show the same availability for me so at least they're all wrong.

I'm trying to figure out why my next door neighbor has their house listed so insanely below both the county assessor value (which is probably too high) and other estimates. Short sale? I'd ask them, but "hey, are you broke and bailing out of your home?" isn't exactly casual conversation

― a landlocked exclave (mh 😏)

Is real estate in your area hot right now? Maybe he wants a bidding war that'll end up with people going over market.

uhh yeah you don't price a house recently appraised at $160k at $110k to trigger a bidding war

That definitely sounds like a short sale situation.

You do (sometimes) in California.

My house is 1939/40. There is probably some lead in it, but if so it's way down under 15 layers of other paint.

The consensus among most homeowners hereabouts is that it would be more dangerous to strip everything off for abatement - and risk stirring old shit up - than to leave it be. Unless you're doing pretty serious renovation anyway.

So long as the children don't regularly gnaw on the windowsills, it's probably fine. There's like 20 other, easier ways for a house to kill you.

so we were able to work a deal w/ the sellers. they came down quite a lot, not quite to the appraisal price, but after a few rounds of negotiation we arrived at a number we were comfortable with. i think they felt they got a bum deal by a conservative appraiser, i don't agree, but whatever. we're happy w/ how it worked out.

weird, are houses not selling? sounds like a situation where I'd be tempted to bounce the deal and reappraise, but I'm glad it worked out for you

i think the sellers were in a bind bc they are under contract for another place of their own, and they really needed the funds from this sale for their down payment. they could've gone back on the market and maybe gotten a better price from another buyer but it would've complicated their own purchase

houses definitely selling though

ahh yeah, that's a weird situation. whoever was buying my friend's house dropped in at the last minute "oh, btw, our lease doesn't end yet so we can't close for two more months" and somehow the negotiated change was my friend, and the seller of the home they were buying, basically bought out the lease

there had to be a more graceful way of handling it, but it reaffirms my suspicion that real estate transactions are dark magic

there are serious deals in East Cleveland:

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/15602-Oakhill-Rd_Cleveland_OH_44112_M48697-50100#photo0

forest hills is like this weird little oasis in east cleveland

has anyone contested their county's assessment? I have a couple weeks to do so and was going to cite the sale price of a couple houses on my block this year, but with the exception of the neighbor short-selling... sales are good

the house in dumb Urblanda Ill-annoy that we've been trying to sell for almost TWO YEARS just got an offer! we've not paid the mortgage in almost a year so this is "short sale" territory, meaning the bank has to agree to take a loss, judging that it's better to take the money now rather than foreclose and try to sell it themselves.

the lesson I've learned: never live in the American midwest ever again.

isn't urbana a smaller college town? the market tends to be a lot different in college scenes, a lot of people gunshy to buy due to the whole adjunct instructor thing

C-U metro area over 200k pop so it's not particularly small. uni hiring freeze due to dumb no budget thing for the last two years hasn't helped.

good luck euler hope you can dump that place soon

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/15602-Oakhill-Rd_Cleveland_OH_44112_M48697-50100#photo0

That is one sweet house for $185K.

Yeah, whoa. Holy shit!

On saturday I bought a house in a midwest college town (east lansing) and the market - or at least the speed with which houses are being sold - was crazy. I sent the realtor a list of 12 houses that I was interested in on Tuesday afternoon, and when I met with him Thursday morning 7 of those were already sold, including a number that had been on the market for a while. It's the time of year when all the new faculty hires are finalized and people were showing up to house shop.

I looked at 15 houses in a 24 hour period and ended up putting in an offer on a place that went on the market the afternoon I got there; the photographer was just leaving when I showed up to see it. The only house I saw that I really loved and could imagine living in long-term instead of as a stopgap, or that would require a lot of updates. It's also in an area half a mile from campus but zoned in a way that disallows single family homes to be operated as rental units, so no chance of having a bunch of dirtbag undergrads living within a couple of blocks.

I live in a college town that also tries to prevent detached houses from becoming student housing, including not allowing basement apartments to be rented separately. But homeowners have found plenty of workarounds, so there's still a good chance you'll have loads of dirtbag undergrads living nearby. There are effectively basement apartments that don't quite meet the legal definition of a basement apartment (if there's no stove in the kitchen but merely a two-burner cooktop and a big countertop oven, it's not legally a kitchen, and thus not legally a separate apartment). Or you can do what I do, rent to students whilst living in the same house and just sharing the whole place instead of cordoning off part of it for rental, which is always allowed here. There are various workarounds for renting your whole house to students too, not to mention lots of homeowners who do it illegally and hope they won't get noticed - which they usually don't unless the tenants cause trouble.

Fortunately, most of the undergrads I've met here, including the 15 or so I've rented to over the years, aren't dirtbags at all.

I mostly love that Cleveland house, but that tiny, cheaply remodeled kitchen is a head-scratcher. Except the sink which is awesome.

The college town I'm in now is physically divided by hills into four roughly equal quadrants, and one of them is almost entirely populated by several thousand undergrads. There are a few die-hard faculty - ones who have been around for ages or others who love the older homes - who live there and on a regular basis have to deal with fights, noise, petty vandalism, drunk kids trying to open your door at 2am because they have the wrong house, etc. Please note that I say this as someone who was a dirtbag undergrad myself.

There are a good number of students living in the other three hills (none of which have any rules about rental property as far as I've ever heard) but they are self-selecting as the type who don't get involved in and don't want to deal with that kind of shit, and that's fine with me. The previous owners of the new place have lived in the place for 18 years and are moving to a different state so I think it probably won't be a total couch-burning dystopia.

congratulations joygoat!!

Good job everyone!
Good luck Euler!

I live in southern california and my parents aren't rich so buying a house: impossible?

There's always over the hill (Palmdale/Lancaster, Hesperia, etc)

take those santa clarita transit busses to commute to downtown/century city for like 4 hours total round trip.. ugh

people seem to either give up on the house for now and buy a condo or buy a house they plan to fix up over time

congrats joygoat!

On saturday I bought a house in a midwest college town (east lansing) and the market - or at least the speed with which houses are being sold - was crazy. I sent the realtor a list of 12 houses that I was interested in on Tuesday afternoon, and when I met with him Thursday morning 7 of those were already sold

my brother and his family are moving a MI college town (not yours) and they said it's the same way. even being just a few hours' drive away has made it that much harder for them to buy a place. it's like that here in cleveland, too, but only in certain neighborhoods. we definitely had an advantage renting in town before buying, the house we bought we saw it, put an offer in, and had the offer accepted all within hours of it being on the market. photos weren't even up until the next day.

also do we have a home improvement / home ownership thread? we are already tallying all the projects we want to do. i strangely thought i would be relieved when this is all over but now i have to call a bunch of contractors, painters, etc.

Congrats, joygoat.
Hey ILX, if you don't mind living in a horrible racist economically-depressed-by-design part of the country, come buy my mom's house.

https://ap.rdcpix.com/406636362/b9acfbac62f4e7d8ffe798ae2849b075l-m0xd-w1020_h770_q80.jpg

whoa! where is that?

wow, it's..... a colonial

that's not your mom's house

It is indeed.
http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/50011-Bear-Rd_Aberdeen_MS_39730_M86514-30157

I live in southern california and my parents aren't rich so buying a house: impossible?

― officer sonny bonds, lytton pd (mayor jingleberries), Tuesday, April 18, 2017 6:36 PM (forty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i hate to say it but the only types of people i know who have purchased houses in recent years in L.A. are people who have been saving their money for a ridiculously long time, are wealthy, have wealthy parents, or received a windfall via inheritance. we've been saving money but not long enough.

everyone else we know who owns a house around here bought twenty years ago. there's a neighbor of ours who bought a fourplex in 1999 for 430k. all two bedrooms. she lives in one of the units and the others all rent out for 3k per month now. the place zillows for 2.3 million now.

we have neighbors across the street who are by no stretch of the imagination wealthy, but they bought their beautiful houses for 200k back in the late '90s and they're all worth well over a million now.

idk we're fine with renting in this particular area, i'd rather rent where i want to live than buy in an area that would be a compromise.

we have friends who have a decent amount of money and are trying to find a nice house in an area they'd like to live for 1.5 million and under, and they've actually had trouble. some of that comes from their own specific taste but i tell you, a million dollar home in L.A. these days isn't really a million dollar home.

that is wild

literally living in a fishbowl there

boston was getting like that and parts of it are insane but even in the nice area where we were renting (west roxbury) a small single family was still like ~$500k (not that we could afford that)

my friend's parents live in santa barbara and are currently moving. both the current and new homes seem big for my tastes, and given that location, the amount of money involved is mind-boggling to me

williamc wow

it looks like one big room but obviously it's not just one big room

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/13715-Shaker-Blvd-Apt-2A_Cleveland_OH_44120_M35090-51618#photo0

These old condo's are right around the corner from where I live. I would seriously considering going into debt for the mortgage, which isn't that outrageous, but I just can't swing the monthly maintenance fee of $2500.

just wait'll they decide to replace the windows :/

williamc maybe check that The Thing isn't building a spaceship out of it?